Creative Development by Hugo Dechesne

Archived entries for video

Already a bit old, but I still find this website to be a lot of fun, mainly because it is so simple and it runs smooth on most computers (unlike some other websites I did). I don’t know how long this website is going to be up since Champagne Valentine tend to change their minds, so check it out on www.champagnevalentine.com or over here. Or just check the video below.

Whenever I go on holiday I tend to shoot lots of photos, but in the end I usually pick the 50 best photos and upload them to my Flickr account. So, a couple of weeks back I made about 1500 photos in Cape Town, and selected only 46 photos to put on my Flickr account, wasting 1400 shots. Then I came across this video, and thought, why not do the same thing with all the photos I took:

Continuing to exploit my recently found spare time, I thought it would be fun to see what happens if you scan a bitmap in search for the greatest color pixels. Turned out to be pretty cool! Even though you can probably do this a million times faster in Photoshop, I’m still pretty happy with the result. Check the images below. Check my flickr site for more details.

So, how does it work:

Sort all the pixels by color. 0xFFFFFF first, 0×000000 last, this means that yellowish pixels will be searched first.

Remove the first pixel from the sorted pixels, and find the neighboring pixel with the greatest value. Remove this pixel from the list.

Continue until no neighbors are found.

Repeat step one until no pixels are left.

It is a very slow algorithm, so I made this video of the process and increased the speed.

UPDATE: made it faster, sorting the pixels had a slow element to it. Now the algorithm is finished within several seconds.

At Random we worked on a game for www.nederlandveilig.nl. The goal was to bring awareness to the 30 km/h and 50 km/h zones. We created a 3D environment with a unique style. By giving the player limited control of the vehicle, we forced the player to concentrate on maintaining the right speed and look out for obstacles on the road. If you want to experience the game for yourself, check it out here. Or watch the video below.

About two months ago, Champagne Valentine won a pitch to make the video clip for the song “The Never-Ending why” from Placebo. In addition to that video clip they also wanted to create an interactive video clip. Random teamed up with them and with lots of hard work from lots of talented people the result ended up to be awesome. To check out the original video clip, click here. To check out the interactive video clip, click here.

The cool thing about the project was that lots of Flash animation and scripted animations are use in the normal video clip, for which we had to create tools to record the motion first, and later render it out frame by frame in flash. The animations I worked on (both linear and interactive) are the squid scene and the tunnel scenes.

The Varekai backstage application is an Adobe AIR application to promote the Varekai show of Cirque du Soleil. The application shows exclusive video’s and photos behind the scenes of the show. Recently I added an upload feature to upload your own “training” photos and videos. Keep an eye out for updates. Download the application here.